My mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on the same cutting board, with the same knife and no bleach or antibacterial wipes, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in waxed paper, or in a plastic bag with a twist tie, in a brown paper bag – not in ice pack coolers – but I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would rather have gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of in a pristine pool (talk about boring), and there were no beach closures then.

We all took gym class – and risked permanent injury with a pair of regular old tennis shoes from a department store if we were lucky, but likely had hand-me-downs instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built-in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I don’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

We got a spanking for doing something wrong – parents called it discipline. And we all grew up to honor and respect our parents, grandparents, teachers, police officers and those older than we were.

We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do math and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter. Even in cursive!

We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, sang the National Anthem and no one got upset. Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wished we hadn’t got. It was shameful, and detention was nothing compared to what was waiting at home.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall ever being bored, even though we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-Box, laptops, cell phones or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren’t! We went outside and played with the neighbor kids of all ages, made up games, and rode our bikes for miles.

Oh yeah, and where were the antibiotics and medical kit when I scraped something or got that bee sting? I could have been killed! We played “king of the hill” on piles of gravel on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mom pulled out the bottle of iodine or red Mercurochrome and then we got our backside spanked. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of antibiotics, and then mom and dad call the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was a threat.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac.